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March 2017

Over the past few months, Jewish Community Centers across the country have received bomb threats that, thankfully, have turned out to be nothing more than threats. Just yesterday the Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn was evacuated after a bomb threat was received via email. The New York Police now believe the calls are all coming from the same individual who's using a voice changer and number spoofer.

Last month, Mika Brzezinski in essence banned presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway from Morning Joe. Saying she doesn't believe in "fake news," Mika declared that Conway has tried to book herself on MJ, but "I won't do it." Brzezinski took things a big step further this morning, seeming to call for Conway to quit the Trump administration. In the context of discussing the criticism of the White House by the Office of Governmental Ethics for not disciplining Conway for her endorsement of Ivanka's clothing line, Mika said "it's probably time for [Conway] to pack it up."

Trying to mirror the success of the post-inagural Women's March, a Day Without Women failed to live up to the "disruptive" expectations. I still maintain the large turnout at the Women's March in January was due to so many women who'd already purchased tickets to see Hillary inaugurated. Her embarassing electoral loss left them with non-refundable tickets, and so they attended a march instead. But I digress... Turns out, not everyone is privileged enough to abdicate their responsibilities for the sake of attention.

If you only read the mainstream, openly left-wing, and establishment Republican media, you'd think it was Apocalypse Now in America. Paraphrasing Pauline Kael's alleged statement about how she didn't see Nixon's win coming because she didn't know anyone who voted for him: The doom and gloom media doesn't know anyone who doesn't hate Trump and who isn't despondent, or if they do know such people, they discount them as imbeciles. But that's not what is reflected in the American spirit, as numerous polls have recently shown.

A fascinating study by an associate professor at NYU reveals why many voters found Trump the more appealing candidate. Surely, perceptions would change with a gender-reversal, right? Perceptions did change, but not quite in the way they'd assumed. Her Opponent is the brainchild of Maria Guadalupe, associate professor of economics and political science and Joe Salvatore, an associate professor of theater. The resulting play included excerpts from each of the three debates performed by actors:

The House Oversight Committee held a hearing today over the Department of Justice Inspector General's report that showed the ATF missed numerous opportunities to arrest the two men linked to the guns used to murder ICE Agent Jaime Zapata in February 2011. However, Ronald Turk, ATF associate deputy director and chief operating officer, and William Temple, ATF's special agent in charge of the Dallas Field Division, refused to show up and testify. This left Chairman Jason Chaffetz fuming.

It is astonishing how much is being revealed about the "Deep State" since Donald Trump was inaugurated less than two months ago. This week, Wikileaks published almost 9,000 documents from the CIA about the agency’s own malware used to hack into anyone’s electronics make it look like the cyber-attack came from Russia. Now, after years of struggling for real justice from the Obama Administration that falsely claimed Tea Party groups were never targeted, citizen activists now have access to nearly 7,000 documents related to the illegal man-handling of their tax status applications by the Internal Revenue Service.

On Monday night (March 6), Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) passed in its second and final reading a law barring the entry of foreign nationals who have “knowingly and publicly” called for boycotting Israel or who “represent an organization” that calls for such a boycott. The law extends the ban to those foreign visitors (excluding permanent residents) who back the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement and to those who support the boycott of settlement goods in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank. The legislation, which passed with 46 votes in favor and 28 against, was sponsored by center-right political parties and had been in the works for over a year, as discussed in detail in my prior post, Will Israel Bar Entry of Foreign BDS Activists?

Gen. Joseph Votel, the general in charge of the U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he needs more troops in Afghanistan to break a stalemate:
“We are developing a strategy, and we are in discussions with the secretary and the department right now,” Gen. Joseph Votel told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I do believe it will involve additional forces to ensure that we can make the advise-and-assist mission more effective.”

While the Merkel government and German media don't like to talk about the No-Go Zones and the rising wave of migrant crime in the country, a popular German TV show "Akte 2017" has brought the issue to the forefront. German journalist and moderator Claus Strunz went to Berlin's Kottbusser Tor area -- dubbed as the 'most dangerous place in Germany' -- to record the latest edition of his show.

As Berlin's Left-wing state government prohibits police from carrying out video surveillance in the capital on the grounds of 'preserving individual privacy', Strunz and his crew installed 9 cameras in and around Kottbusser Tor, and ran them for 48 hours. Last year, Berlin police registered 1,600 crimes in Kottbusser Tor. However, according to the show's moderator Strunz, his crew recorded 'hundreds of crimes' in just 48 hours and with just 9 cameras.

Shortly before the presidential election, GOP public relations worker Steve Schmidt saw Hillary Clinton "trending over 400" electoral college votes. He also predicted that Dems would retake the Senate and were "close" to retaking the House. We know how all that played out. So you probably want to take this morning's comments from the man who brought you John McCain's 2008 campaign with a gargantuan grain of salt. Asked on Morning Joe what he would tell President Trump regarding his assertion that President Obama tapped his phones, Schmidt went on a rant.

A conservative student group at the University of Lincoln in the UK criticized their students' union over a lack of free speech over criticism of an online magazine. In response, the students' union shut down the group's social media accounts, thus proving their point. A student paper called The Linc reported:
Conservative Society suspended from Twitter by SU after criticising their record on freedom of speech The University of Lincoln Conservative Society has been forced to hand over control of their twitter account to the Students’ Union. It follows a tweet sharing a report which said the University of Lincoln had a bad record on freedom of speech.